(some of the following information may be subject to change)

Aldoc

aldoc is a markup language with the goal of providing the beauty and control of LaTeX documents with Markdown's pretty syntax, in other words, letting you write your documents without ever needing to touch LaTeX code.

It does so while also trying to solve some quirks that Markdown had since its creation: its rules were never clearly established, and as more features were needed for document formatting, variants began appearing, each with their own differences.

The different versions and editions of Markdown vary mildly in syntax, thus making it unreliable for posting on multiple platforms (GitHub Markdown, original HTML Markdown, Pandoc Markdown, etc.)

Status

This project is still in its infancy (pre-alpha), and major design decisions haven't been taken yet. The goals spoken of haven't been reached yet, and features are lacking, this shouldn't be used on its current state.

Syntax

The syntax of aldoc is still WIP: what syntax will be the most beneficious has not yet been decided, but still, the one used for testing temporarily is the following:

Paragraphs are spaced with a blank line between them. ``` Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum dolor quam, sagittis quis porta id, mattis eget ligula. Morbi id eros ut mi lobortis laoreet non vel magna. Sed sollicitudin dapibus metus ut ultrices.

Sed ornare dolor risus, sit amet pretium tellus tempus et. Vivamus aliquet, felis venenatis finibus lacinia, nisi velit laoreet odio, vitae pellentesque turpis eros nec est. Maecenas vestibulum scelerisque cursus. ```
Unnumbered lists can be written with the - or the + character. <ul> <li>Alement</li> <li>Belement</li> <li>Celement

Enumerated lists can be written in many ways. Aldoc's design allow you to use any combination of enumerator (1, a, III) and symbol (., ), -).

With numbers: <ol> <li>Alement</li> <li>Belement</li> <li>Celement
With letters (uppercase or lowercase): a) Alement b) Belement c) Celement
With roman numbers (uppercase or lowercase): I- Alement II- Belement III- Celement

Bold text is written with asterisks around it.


Normal text is written *until the asterisks come around*.

Tool

As a tool, library and Cargo package, it provides an abstraction for the language and also a way to compile the documents to PDF. To do that the following processes takes place:

The aldoc source is parsed into a Rust abstraction.
The abstraction is compiled to LaTeX.
The LaTeX code is compiled to PDF via Tectonic.

Usage

To actually compile the document, you only need to provide it with the input file path (.ald) and the output pdf path, like this:

shell $ aldoc doc.ald compile out.pdf

You may even omit the output file, in which case, aldoc will output a pdf with the same basename as the document.

shell $ aldoc doc.ald compile # outputs pdf as "doc.pdf"

Features

[X] Normal paragraphs
[X] Allow LaTeX in the source
[X] Bold text
[X] Unnumbered lists
[X] Enumerated lists
- [X] Numbered
- [X] Alphabetic
- [X] Roman
[X] UTF-8 support
[X] Cross-platform line endings
[ ] Control list tokens completely (make the selected token symbol appear in the final document)
[ ] Checkboxes
[ ] Embeds
- [ ] Images
- [ ] Vector images
- [ ] Tables
[ ] Line separators
[ ] LaTeX template support (for defaulting styles or packages)

Thanks

Thanks to Markdown, and the Nom parser library for providing the necessary tools, as it was fundamental to making the Aldoc parser more extensible. Links for reference:

(ironically this README is written in Markdown)